Fifty Shades of… oh stuff it, I’m not making a lame Book Porn pun

What follows is either a fascinating post about book classification, or a self-deluded account of high-level work avoidance strategies – take your pick. Either way, I have found My Adventures In Book Porn to be more exciting than bestselling women’s erotica. Which is probably a bad thing.

Last weekend, I spent a pleasurable few hours rearranging my fiction and poetry books from their previous system (alphabetical by author’s last name). They are now arranged by colour, like this:

I think this is very beautiful, so much so that it affords further opportunities for work avoidance, viz. that I sometimes stop work just so I can look at it. It does occur to me that this may seem like the product of a disturbed mind (I have, for example, spent quite some time fiddling with the reds so that they segue from scarlet into crimson. In the following picture the process was not quite complete):

The truth is that I am really quite anal and will always need to use some structuring principle to organise my books. Grouping by colour is, in fact, pretty free-wheeling by my standards, a step away from the strictures of alphabetising, towards serendipity and chance.

This is a posh way of saying I’ll never find anything again.

Here are some blues and violets:

Lovely, aren’t they? There’s a great survey in the latest MsLexia about book fetishists. The magazine asked 2,300 women writers to answer questions about their relationship with books. Some of the respondents make me look positively laid-back. ‘When publishers redesign their logos,’ one woman says. ‘I have to rearrange books and authors to keep the different logos apart.’ I particularly like the ‘have to’ in there. I wonder if she knew she’d done that?

Here are some beiges, which I’ve found more aesthetically pleasing than I expected.

These pictures also illustrate what book lovers already know: that you can glean a huge amount of information about someone from their library. It is nakedly obvious here, for example, that whilst I’ve read Middlesextwice (the curved and softened spine, the scuffed edges) my copy of Middlemarch(T.V. tie-in!) remains untouched.

Blimey, I love books. Actual books, with covers and blurbs and bookmarks I’ve left in them, and bent-back spines and tea stains.